But wait! There’s more!
As you may have noticed, I briefly mentioned a social experiment I was conducting through Twitter in the About Me section of this webpage. Throughout this independent study, I observed how linguistic variances such as the use of emojis, images, and different writing styles and tone influenced engagement levels on social media.
This experiment consisted of two different Twitter accounts posting the same content, one (gogumatan or Account A) using more colloquial language with lots of visual add-ons (i.e., emojis and images), and the other (btstranslating or Account B) using more formal language with no such visual add-ons.
A sample tweet from gogumatan:
A sample tweet from btstranslating:
At first glance, these two tweets may not seem so different, since they are delivering the same content. However, they yielded very different results.
Tweet activity for gogumatan:
Tweet activity for btstranslating:
As you can see, gogumatan, or Account A, received nearly ten times as many likes than btstranslating, or Account B. This was the case for nearly every single Tweet posted by these accounts throughout the duration of the experiment (40 Tweets over the course of 10 weeks).
Account A received an average of 297 likes per Tweet, while Account B only averaged about 75 likes. Similarly, Account A had a higher average share count, with around 144 average 'retweets' per Tweet compared to Account B’s 30. Additionally, Account A had garnered a total of 201 followers by the end of the experiment, while Account B had only reached 41.
The slightest differences in tone and the addition of an emoji or two dramatically changed the engagement results of each of the two accounts. This goes to show that we, as humans, tend to prefer familiarity over formality, particularly on social media platforms. Tweets from Account A, with more colloquial language and emoticons, seemed to be more eye-catching and easier for readers to process than Account B, which influenced their decisions to like and/or share the Tweet.
And this leads me to the reason why I wanted to share the results of my research with you: to show the importance of processing fluency, which is the ease at which our brains process information, subconsciously influencing our opinions towards things and the decisions we make on a day-to-day basis.
Thank you for reading, and I hope that some of these cognitive suggestions have helped or will help you in mastering the art of communicating without talking. From social media to advertisements to business techniques, these blog posts, as well as the presented social experiment, have encompassed a lot of topics that all come down to one central concept: processing fluency.
That's a wrap! :)
Thank you for all the great posts! Really learned a lot from them